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Fiction Short Stories (single Author)

Good Victory

by (author) Mikka Jacobsen

Publisher
Freehand Books
Initial publish date
Feb 2025
Category
Short Stories (single author), Literary
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781990601842
    Publish Date
    Feb 2025
    List Price
    $10.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781990601835
    Publish Date
    Feb 2025
    List Price
    $22.95

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Description

Debut stories about the absurdity of growing up and being human in the twenty-first century.

A woman finds her childhood friend working in a booth at a psychic fair in the West Edmonton Mall courtyard. A lonely neuropsychology student steals cocaine from his lab rat in an effort to impress a Tinder date. A group of teenage girls play a dangerous game and discover a portal to another reality.

Good Victory explores the strangeness and absurdity of being human in the twenty-first century: high school dances, teen pregnancy, and the continued cultural relevance of Wayne's World; fatalistic obsessions with karaoke bars and Dolly Parton; supposed pimps hiding under the Calgary Stampede watchtower. Both unsettling and illuminating, these stories shine light in dark places.

About the author

Mikka Jacobsen is the author of the essay collection Modern Fables (Freehand Books, 2022). Her work has appeared in Joyland, The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, Prairie Fire, Canadian Notes & Queries, The Missouri Review, and Lit Hub, among others. She won Alberta Views' 2022 Short Story Contest. She lives in Calgary, AB. Good Victory is her first collection of stories.

Mikka Jacobsen's profile page

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Good Victory

 

"In these taut, revelatory, slyly wry tales of sinister neighbours, distracted mothers, careless dads, and bad friends, Mikka Jacobsen probes the darkness that lurks around the edges of childhood and young womanhood with a gaze as unflinching and unsettling as Heather O'Neill's." LISA ALWARD, author of Cocktail

 

"Jacobsen wields precise, sardonic prose to forge a suburban gothic landscape where dinner tables, buses, basements, holiday party karaoke hold the potential for both nefariousness and redemption. Her characters peddle in secrets that hover below the surface as these stories gloriously puncture our ost primal human wounds." ADELE BARCLAY, author of If I Were in a Cage I'd Reach Out for You and Renaissance Normcore

"Mikka Jacobsen's stories burn straight to the heart. . . . With wit, confidence and a delicious kind of dark humour, Jacobsen brings our deepest fears and desires to the surface—and what a relief that is." NADINE SANDER-GREEN, author of Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit

 

Praise for Mikka Jacobsen

 

". . . wickedly good, wickedly funny, wickedly smart, but also just plain wicked." SUZETTE MAYR author of The Sleeping Car Porter

 

". . . the ethos is reminiscent of Sheila Heti—unafraid to reveal its own intellect as it pushes through doubts, romanticisms and conventional delusions, toward revelation and a shimmering, precarious clarity." ALBERTA VIEWS

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